I think the last time I parked in this garage was June 3rd, 2010. That time I was here to eat fancy Mexican food. This time I was here to buy large bore straws for my wife from the mean lady at the Asian market.

It was nice being back in Boulder, seeing my coworkers and family again. But man am I ready to be home. I came a day earlier than usual to go to Peter’s going away party / baby shower, and I’m leaving a day late because of the snow. It’s been a long one.

I came back to Boulder to work out of the office for a week. It was the compromise I made for my company to let me work remotely. One week per month, to get in some face time with my coworkers.

But I ended up in the conference room for most of the week. I worked alone and didn’t get to converse with people much. Luckily I was sitting next to the only candy source in the office, so I got to see my coworkers whenever they needed a fix. Some came and visited me pretty frequently…

The Kohn men ate steak and checked out the new base coating on the stairs. Then Dustin and I drove home in the snow and geeked out over how much money was spent blasting shit to pieces in the great EVE Online Battle of 2014.

Caitlin, Evan, Caitlin’s friend Mike, an older lady glob-on, and I did QuickLeft’s Hackfest tonight. I’ve never been to one, and really had no idea what to expect.

We were given a handful of random beer-related data files (e.g. liquor store annual beer sales, flavor attributes of beers, etc.) and three hours to do something with them. Anything, really.

So Caitin, being the creative type she is, came up with the idea of OkBrupid, the beer soulmate finder. We displayed a list of beer flavors, and depending on the combination of flavors you chose we presented the best beer match for you…based on our limited dataset. At the last minute Mike was also able to setup a textarea where you could describe yourself, and if you happened to type one of the flavors, your beer list would start to filter. Ideally we would have incorporated a larger dataset, and a wider array of synonyms for the flavors (I spent about 1/3 of my time coming up with the synonym list, only for time to run out before we incorporated it).

In any case, it was fun. And everybody kicked ass. Except for the older lady…I’m not quite sure what her contribution was. But boy was she happy with the final product.